Top Israeli conductor joins anti-war protest in Tel Aviv

The conductor Ilan Volkov, music director of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, will lead an ad hoc ensemble of musicians at an anti-war protest tomorrow in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square.

The protest, organised by the artist Omer Krieger, will call for peace talks and an end to the occupation.

A number of cultural personalities have pledged their participation. The group will gather in the square at 8pm. Their slogan reads: ‘We stand together against the silence of the sane majority and call on other to join us with the appeal, “Enough with war. Long live peace”‘.

Ilan Volkov tells www.slippedisc.com: ‘We will do some improvised vocal and instrumental response to the situation. It is a small part of an evening with many other performances.’

Oh I do, and I see that Hamas is the one who occupies Gaza and doesn’t want peace. Hamas hides weapons in schools, uses civilians as human shields, straps animals with explosives, hides rockets in hospitals, ambulances, and mosques, fires rockets at innocent civilians, and builds tunnels into Israel to perpetrate terror attack at children and woman.

Hamas terrorists has fired 1,820 rockets at Israel since July 8. That’s 140 rockets every day. What if they were attacking your home?

Volkov is just looking for publicity, and what is better than condemning Israel along with the whole world?

That is correct, Will, and as you know, Hamas is responsible for this.

1. Hamas uses all the “support money” to get more weapons and build more tunnels, instead of building schools and developing Gaza. You probably know that 99% of the cement that Israel is giving Gaza is used by Hamas to build more tunnels. Materials meant for civilians enter Gaza every week. Hamas uses them to build tunnels for its terror attacks. Imagine what Hamas would do with more raw materials.

2. There are no militaries like the IDF. There are no militaries that drop leaflets and telephone civilians before a strike. The IDF fires a warning shot at targets in Gaza. In response, Hamas makes these civilians run to the roof with their kids. They are human shields of the Hamas leaders.

3. Israel has a moral obligation to avoid civilian casualties. It also has a moral obligation to defend its people.

4. When the IDF has agreed to the Red Cross’ request for a ceasefire in Shuja’iya, Hamas opened fire from near Wafa Hospital.

Hammas might be a bunch of Islamist goons, but Israel’s actions are both immoral and illegal. Telephoning families to warn them that they have a few minutes to get out before their homes will be destroyed? Call that moral?! Israel’s support is slowly leeching away around the world, which is highly unfortunate for that nation founded with such high aims and painful history.

Gaza shares a land border with Egypt too: neither Israel nor Egypt applies a ‘blockade’, just sensible restrictions on the movement of arms, munitions and other goods likely to be used for military purposes. As for children being killed, how many died when rockets that Hamas fired at Israel fell back into Gaza? And how many children were killed owing to Hamas using them as a shield by hiding weapons in schools, hospitals, places of worship and people’s homes?

Dear Will, You use very exotic language for quite a straightforward matter. Could you specify when and how Israel ‘stole’ Palestinian land? Before embarrassing yourself you could have opened up Wikipedia to read some history on the matter… We all want peace, but when you have neighbours that are willing to sacrifice their own children and innocent civilians to annihilate you, one starts to wonder about any potential resolution.

Are you kidding me? Tunnels full with explosives, IDF uniforms, drugs and weapons are necessary because there’s a blockade? The tunnels ARE the reason for the partial blockade.

By saying that “the root” of all this is “Israel’s theft of Palestinian land”, you do have a point. I agree that the Jews/Zionists who came to “Palestine/Erez Israel” more than 100 years ago, didn’t take enough care and consideration for the arab natives and for the problem that their presence there was causing.

BUT, it wasn’t a “Palestinian land” as you probably learned in second grade. Also, your grandparents is Russia, Germany, France, Italy, Iraq, and a whole lot of other countries, did everything in their hands to get rid of their jewish neighbours, by initiating pogroms, by following antisemitism policies, and ultimately by sending the Jews to the gas chambers.

Guess what, the Jews didn’t wanted to die. They came to their fatherland, the same one that your great great grandparents expelled the them from.

So you clearly don’t know history, and you can’t interpret what your eyes see.

Dear Dan, Though I agree with most of what you say, Jews/Zionists we’re coming to Palestine from 1880 and officially buying land by the sea which was barren. There was no tension or war about this until the state of Israel was created.

Also, you might want to read Hillel Cohen’s book about the 1929 riots (Meoraot Tarpat). The English version should be published soon.

Finally, you could use anything that Eliyahu Eliashar wrote. He was born in Jerusalem at a time when it was part of the Ottoman Empire, and he has the most interesting insights about Jews, Arab, and Zionism.

From the archives

From the archives

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